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Days After the Storm, Many Are Still in the Dark

A utility pole dangled over an intersection in Greenwich, Conn., on Wednesday afternoon.Credit
Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

First came the roaring winds and drenching rain, followed by devastating floods. Now, for four straight days, darkness and disconnect.

One of the most frustrating and stubborn aftereffects of Tropical Storm Irene has been the inability to restore electricity to swaths of the Northeast, especially in Connecticut, where roughly 300,000 customers were still without power on Wednesday night. Some whole towns in New England were cut off, while almost every home and business in New York City had been running on full power for days.

The slow restoration of the connections needed to heat water, run refrigerators and recharge cellphones prompted a lot of grumbling from elected officials and their constituents, most of it aimed at big utility companies. And the complaints did not always find sympathy: Connecticut Light and Power, the state’s largest utility, said it might seek to raise rates to offset the $75 million in costs it expected to incur repairing its grid.

As the public dissatisfaction rose, so did the death toll from the storm, which caused relentless flooding that continued to create hazardous conditions from Vermont to Virginia. The National Guard airlifted supplies to 13 towns in Vermont left stranded by washed-out roads, while some residents of the Catskills region of New York subsisted on canned spaghetti heated on outdoor grills. In Connecticut, the start of the school year was postponed until next week while high schools were turned into shelters and libraries into makeshift Internet cafes.

Fixing broken lines was complicated by a lack of repair crews, and in some places, flooding. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said water had seeped into about 40 percent of the homes in Lincoln Park, Morris County, and he repeated his demand that President Obama declare the state a disaster area. Earlier in the day, the president declared several flood-ravaged counties in upstate New York a “major disaster.”

Though all of New Jersey’s rivers had finally crested, Mr. Christie said several, including the Passaic River, would quite likely remain at dangerously high levels for another day or two. Because of damage to water treatment facilities, more than a dozen municipalities continued to ask their residents to boil water. Meanwhile, some 10,000 residents, mostly from Morris and Passaic Counties, remained evacuated from flooded neighborhoods, and 765 people stayed in 16 shelters.

“We’re clearly not out of the woods yet,” said Mr. Christie, who saw some of the worst-hit areas with Janet Napolitano, the federal secretary of homeland security, and W. Craig Fugate, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

In New Jersey, about 20 percent of those who lost electricity, or 179,000 customers, still had none. In New York, about 287,000 customers had no power, more than half of them on Long Island. All told, more than one million homes and businesses on the East Coast were still waiting for electricity to be restored.

For many of those without power, the main complaint was a lack of solid information about how long their plight would last. Some said they would rather hear that the electricity would be off for a week than to be left wondering.

To allay some of that confusion, elected officials took to dragging utility executives before the television cameras to answer questions. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut brought top executives of the state’s two main power providers along to a news conference on Tuesday evening. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo took the same tack on Wednesday, insisting that Mark S. Lynch, the president of New York State Electrical and Gas, make public appearances in areas without electrical service.

Officials in the Cuomo administration have been frustrated by the difficulty they have encountered in getting some utilities to communicate, according to one official who was not authorized to speak publicly. When one of Mr. Cuomo’s advisers called the state’s utilities to press them to prepare for the cleanup, he had to track down a senior executive of National Grid in Europe, the official said. The company, which owns utilities in New York, has its headquarters in England.

Photo

Arnold Jaeger, 69, filled his generator with gas for his home, which still does not have electricity, outside Prattsville, N.Y.Credit
Michael Appleton for The New York Times

Some utility customers were hunkering down for the wait.

“It’s difficult at best, but we have our home,” said Diana Jaeger, 62, a resident of Prattsville, N.Y., a town without power on the western edge of Greene County. She said she expected to be without electricity “for a long time.”

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Ms. Napolitano accompanied Mr. Cuomo on a tour of Prattsville on Wednesday; the governor characterized the town as the hardest hit in the state.

In Easton, Conn., Lina Siciliano, 62, said the protracted loss of power, supplied by United Illuminating Company, was much more than an inconvenience.

“I don’t know what to say, I’m so upset,” said Ms. Siciliano, whose father and injured mother came to stay with her after losing power at their home in upstate New York. “I have two 84-year-old people in the house. All my insulin went bad. All the food in the refrigerator and freezer went bad.”

Ms. Siciliano said she had called the utility six times. “I couldn’t get through,” she said. The municipal workers cutting trees opposite her house told her she might have to wait another four or five days. She said her patience would run out before then.

“People just didn’t feel that the utility companies’ actions matched what they had been told,” United States Representative Joe Courtney said after surveying the damage in his district in eastern Connecticut. “The execution just wasn’t there. That’s pretty darn frustrating.”

Mr. Courtney said he and Governor Malloy had just met with residents of several towns where most of the homes have not had their power restored. In North Stonington, which was completely dark, Mr. Courtney said they were told no repair crews had shown up yet.

Jeff Butler, the president of Connecticut Light and Power, said the company would have 1,200 crews on the job by Friday, 400 of them to clear trees and branches and 800 to repair fallen and tangled overhead lines. Most of those crews were called in from other states. Some crews came from as far away as British Columbia.

Securing enough help was complicated by the size of the storm, Mr. Courtney said. About 100 of the crews that the utility had requested from Quebec were en route to Connecticut when they were recalled to repair the damage that the storm did there, he explained.

Despite the scope of the restoration project it faced, the utility was no longer receiving a break from many of its customers by Wednesday afternoon. In the emergency operations center in Ridgefield, a town constable, Tom Belote, absorbed some residents’ wrath. Even his wife had complained, he said, about the town’s decision to cut off all power after the storm knocked out electricity to more than 90 percent of the homes on Sunday.

Mr. Belote’s house was in one of the few neighborhoods that had been spared. But it too went dark after town officials agreed with the utility that it would be best to eliminate the risks of electrocution while crews worked to restore the power.

“After four days of answering phone calls from my neighbors, I can say a number of people were frustrated,” Mr. Belote said. “For some of them, I tell them my tale of woe and it seems to work. For others, I just take the verbal abuse. I’m used to it.”

Mr. Butler, the utility executive, did not assuage the rising ire when he said on Wednesday that the company would explore ways to recoup the costs of restoration from its customers. Utilities are allowed to do that, but given customers’ anger, nobody was in the mood to consider that possibility.

Correction: September 2, 2011

An article on Thursday about the number of people in the Northeast without electricity after Tropical Storm Irene misidentified the county in New Jersey in which Lincoln Park is located. The county is Morris, not Passaic.

Reporting was contributed by Sam Dolnick from Paterson, N.J.; Kristin Hussey and Robert Davey from Connecticut; Thomas Kaplan from New York; Noah Rosenberg from Prattsville, N.Y.; and Dirk Van Susteren from Calais, Vt.

A version of this article appears in print on September 1, 2011, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Days After the Storm, Many Are Still in the Dark. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe